Jimjar

I used to be something else. I don't know what but I know that I was not what I am. He ate my memories. I do not understand what that means but that is what he says he did and he enjoys cruel honesties so I have to believe him.

My memories start on the Ziggurat. Chained and shackled, I was all too aware of what would come next. It was the damnable fish-man Head Sacrifice. They had strung a delicate silvery metal wire around each of our necks and tethered each of us to a massive block of stone hanging above our heads. They did not care about the body, only the head. It was clear that when that weight fell free it would rip every one of our heads off like mushroom caps in a flood.

I thought I would be calm at the end, heroic perhaps. I was not.

I wept, I pleaded, I connived. There was a duergar beside me in the same circumstance and he was like stone, making me look all the more pitiful in comparison. In the end I offered my soul and service to any power that I could think of. It was a despicable thing, so not Svirfnebli of me. That was the kind of thing that a human would have done but I said it and at the time I meant it. Grandmother would not have been proud of me for that. I don't know why I have that thought still but somehow even without any true memory of her I know in my heart that I have failed her expectations of me.

I offered myself to the courts of the Fey, Seelie and Unseelie but they did not answer. Perhaps if I had been a surfacer, of the earth and not of the stone then maybe they would have heard me first. I think I even appealed to Mammon and he surely would have jumped at the chance at a nebli soul but I think the chaos warp of the Deep Ones had clouded me to the Diablerie on some level. No, what answered was nothing that I asked, no name known to me before.

The voice in my head had the tone of a lazy whisper but the power of mountains grinding together. It made no sound but my ears trembled all the same. "You will feed us?" That was all the explanation it gave. I was equal parts jubilant and terrified but in my panic I agreed without hesitation. It did not respond again but I knew the deal was set. The irons around my feet fell away just as the Deep One trap went off and I felt just enough of a push into the air that the cable did not whip my head into the street but rather I was vaulted bodily into the ceiling.

The clown brigade completed my rescue somehow, but I knew that other hands were at work. I felt the bulk of my memories painfully burned away and arcane power etched into my mind. I wept at the loss and the tragedy of not knowing what was being taken but knowing all too clearly that it was gone forever.

The thing came later in the night, not to explain but only to demand. It made it clear that I was bound to it, not the other way around. It called itself "Thog". Somehow the name fit perfectly.

Thog was small. If it stood on its hind legs (which it hated to do) you might measure it at eighteen inches. It was a gangrel thing with spindly limbs on a too fat body, all covered with downy fur. Its ears were long and expressive, much moreso than its barely open slits of eyes. The nose was somewhere between a bat's snout and the vacant nasal cavern of a rotting skull, and the mouth seemed to go on forever with needle-sharp teeth and an ever lolling tongue that dripped bright crimson as if the creature did not possess the mental capacity to not bite through its own flesh.

On one level it only ever spoke one thing, a never-ending fricative chant of its own name over and over without even pausing for breath, but on a deeper level it was completely coherent in my brain. It said that it could appear only to me, or it could be 'here' as it called it. It warned me that if it was 'here' that I must always protect it or the thing that it left behind would surely eat me first. This warning was the closest thing to kindness that it ever uttered to me.